Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Sharma has it on his fridge, he tells me. He's just sitting there waiting, looking at it, hoping for it to manifest: 'When am I going to get this fabled number? When is it going to come to me?' It didn't happen. It was never going to happen. The more we hear it, the more ludicrous it becomes. In his excellent commentary earlier on, Senator Sharma used the word 'gaslighting', which is a term that I've known for a while. It took him a while—not me. This is the ultimate form of gaslighting because I don't think that Prime Minister Albanese had any feel that would become reality. We have seen why now. The plan was never to encourage a drop in power prices; the plan was to spend as much of your money and my money and Senator Scarr's money as he could in order to prop up this intermittent power Ponzi scheme that we have. Have you heard about this? This is a scheme where you go out and get power from the sun and the wind—except when the shine doesn't go and the wind doesn't blow. Some people call these 'bird choppers', by the way. They do. They call them 'bird choppers'. They chop up birds. Go to the bottom of one of these things and you'll see it's like a bird graveyard. They've got the Holy Trinity: they're expensive, they don't work when the wind's not blowing, and they kill the wildlife. Imagine the left going for this! But here we are and that's where we've got to.

Now we're here, after all this, and today we heard Senator Duniam ask some questions about the comments made by the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator. He said, 'I can't guarantee that the prices will be lower under this energy plan.' What a shock it was when we found out that it's actually going to be $642 billion more expensive. We now learn that costs are going to be five times higher than what was originally claimed. That sounds like a bit of gaslighting to me.

We understand that on this side of the chamber. We've set out a plan for bringing energy prices down. It involves nuclear power and it involves gas, obviously. Yet what have we got? We've got Chris Bowen racing around at COP29 looking very excited—he's in with his people and loving it; it's like going to Disneyland—but not actually allowing us to sign up to the nuclear bit. During the previous COP, 31 countries signed up and signed this nuclear agreement; it's true. These COP conferences are where billionaires go to tell millionaires how to tell us to live, by the way. We turn up this year and we're still: 'Oh, I don't know about nuclear power. No-one's ever tried before.' Everyone's tried it. Canada has a $5 billion a year industry—I think it's actually $15 billion; I could be wrong—based on this very technology. 'It's unproven.' But everyone uses it. All of the OECD countries use it; France uses it. 'It's going to poison the landscape.' Well, your French champagne you chug down at the chairman's lounge doesn't seem to bother you, does it? No-one seems to care. They all get into their French champagne and they're like: 'Where's the radiation? Who's got the radiation?' No one's got the radiation, because it's a complete joke.

What we want in this country is cheap power, and there's no plan to get it under this. We've now got proof that the plan is going to cost $642 billion. What we actually need in this country is a department of government efficiency, a DOGE. That is what the Trump administration's going to do. It's brought in Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Elon reckons he can cut $2 trillion from that. I reckon I could do it in about 45 minutes around here. You go to estimates and watch bureaucrats walking around and patting each other on the back, saying: 'Great job. What's your job?' 'I'm in gender diversity.' 'No kidding! Are you really? Wow!' 'What do you do?' 'I'm into bird choppers. I regulate bird choppers. I'm the bird chopper guy.' I reckon I could do it in about 15 minutes—honestly. Give me the job; I'll do it! The Australian DOGE—that'll be me. Anyway, it's going to be too expensive.